Social visionaries have long dreamed of an ideal society in which all people are equal, healthy, happy, well-fed, educated, content, share equally in labor and its benefits, and are not moved to make war.

In Oregon in the late 1890s, the seeds of such a vision were planted a few miles north of Toledo, on the road to Siletz, in Lincoln County. It was named Bellamy Colony after social revisionist Edward Bellamy.

Bellamy died in May 1898 at age 48 of tuberculosis, not long after Bellamy Colony began its short existence. His spirit carried on in the form of an 1888 novel, "Looking Backward, 2000-1887."

In the novel, an upper-class dandy falls into a trance and wakes up 113 years later in a society at peace with itself and the world, where everything is geared to the benefit of the whole -- a veritable socialist Valhalla.

The novel sold more than a million copies, second only to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Ben Hur," and Bellamy donned the mantle of prophet in America's socialist movement. Bellamy Nationalist Clubs sprang up in New England and then across the country as "communitarianism" was embraced by intellectuals such as William Dean Howells and labor leader Eugene Debs.

In rural Minnesota, the book influenced a young agrarian reformer, Olaf Anders Tveitmoe, an 1882 immigrant from Norway. Tveitmoe climbed aboard the Bellamy bandwagon, and with another Norwegian immigrant, Sondre Romtvedt, organized a move to Oregon to form a commune.

Which of the two was the primary mover and shaker isn't clear. Romtvedt listed himself as president and Tveitmoe as secretary. But Tveitmoe "appeared to be the leader and spokesperson," says James Kopp of Lewis & Clark College, author of the just-out "Eden within Eden, Oregon's Utopian Heritage" (OSU Press, $24.95, 370 pages).

Olaf Tveitmoe

In any case, the group made its way to Oregon and in a rent-to-own deal with an aged Swedish immigrant named John Allen, settled on Allen's 160 acres on Depot Slough north of Toledo. As of 1898, the colony consisted of the Tveitmoe and Romtvedt families, two other families and two bachelors -- altogether about 20 men, women and children.

Toledo's Lincoln County Leader newspaper reported progress early on: land cleared, two houses built, five acres sowed in wheat. On Jan. 13, 1899, the Leader carried another upbeat assessment:

"Ye editor visited Bellamy Colony Monday. He found a beautiful tract of land there and a coterie of men who are good farmers, energetic workers and will succeed. Everything is cared for about the place Two new houses have been erected and time only is needed to make the place a beautiful home."

But unrest lay beneath it all. In February of that year, Tveitmoe complained in a letter to the newspaper of the similar Equality Colony on Puget Sound:

"Owing to the furious and ignoble attacked of the enuemy and ... cowardly traitors, Bellamy's growth during its short period of existence has been greatly retarded."

Just who those enemies and traitors were, Tveitmoe didn't say. Kopp suggests one might have been Romtvedt, who had quit the colony in late January. Or they might have been Lincoln County wholesalers who, under threat of boycott by retailers, refused to sell to the colony.

In April 1899 came word that the colony had lost a lawsuit Allen had filed to reclaim his land. He charged that the colony was behind on its payments and added that he'd never signed the rent-sale contract. Stripped of their land, the colonists could but go their separate ways.

(Many thanks to Carol Romtvedt Ginter of Waldport, granddaughter of Sondre Romtvedt, who first called Bellamy Colony to John Terry's attention a decade ago and has worked tirelessly to record its history.)